


Damned

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Ending, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e16 No Rest for the Wicked, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-15
Updated: 2013-06-15
Packaged: 2017-12-15 01:57:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/843966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Hell is oneself; Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.</i> George Eliot</p>
            </blockquote>





	Damned

When Dean was twelve, the kid he palled around with in Hattiesburg had a book of ghost stories. Stupid, baby stuff. The kind of stories that hadn’t scared Dean since the first time he saw his father waste a spirit. But Kenny thought that book was the shit and Dean had to admit the pictures were on the money and so he didn’t bitch much when Kenny wanted to play freak Dean out. 

There was this one story, though. Nothing much to it on the surface, just some dude alone in a creepy ass house and a spirit that did a lot of useless jabbering while walking slowly up the stairs. The usual. But there was this moment toward the end when the ghost finally opened the door to the room where the guy was hiding—it was lights out for that poor bastard, no two ways about it, and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. So he closed his eyes and he waited. And even through his closed eyelids, he could still see her coming, her rotting face inching ever closer. Kenny never seemed to notice how truly creepy that was and Dean wasn’t gonna clue him in. 

Dean tried to explain it to Sam years later on a road trip to Houston that never seemed to end. “Dude, if you can’t be alone in your own head, if you can’t give yourself one final illusion of peace before you kick it, then you are well and truly fucked.” Sam nodded along like he knew exactly what Dean meant and Dean never mentioned it again.

Dean thinks about that story a lot, now that he’s living it.

Hell is empty, or at least his little corner. Dean can see nothing for miles but webbing of chains and lightning that smears the press of clouds a sickly green. When he closes his eyes, Dean sees the same damn things he sees with his eyes open—the blood on his clothes, his feet twitching where they hang, an endless and haphazard cocoon of metal. He can’t shut it all out and imagine something else, some _where_ else. He can’t focus long enough on his memories to call them up for comfort. Dean gets a half-second of his dad’s rough bass or a brief glimpse of Bobby’s ball cap and then he’s back on a meat hook with blood dripping down his legs and into nothingness.

So it’s not just the constant physical pain that makes this place Hell, although yeah. That’s a bitch. Dean is beginning to forget what Sammy looked like. 

The wind, the hot and sour breath of evil, whispers to him. Nothing he can hear exactly, but rather a terrible and overwhelming reverberation in his bones. Dean feels as if the sound is splitting him apart and he wishes the damn wind would say something already.

He wonders where all the gloating demons are, the ones who want to twist their fingers in his wounds. He wishes they would show, just for something different, but Dean figures he’s got nothing now but time. He can wait. With every breath, Dean remembers, _Forever. This is forever._

Dean has no way to measure the passage of time. Nothing changes for him. He hurts, and he is afraid and lonely, and more and more he forgets the things he used to know. He can’t really remember now what it felt like to fuck a hot girl, or drive his car, or land a punch. He can’t remember what his mother used to tell him before she tucked him in every night and he can’t remember if Cassie wore her hair curly or straight and Sam is like a blur—right there in Dean’s peripheral vision but indistinct and unknowable.

Then Dean is no longer alone. 

It takes Ruby ten minutes, ten days, ten years to reach him, crawling on the chains like a grotesque perversion of a spider. She looks the same as Dean remembers, exactly the same, except that her hair is burned off down to the scalp on the right side and her hands are shredded where she grips the chains. She’s got a pretty spectacular shiner on one eye, too. Dean doesn’t know how that can be, how she can look the same, when that body she was wearing was never her own, but she does. He realizes that he didn’t see her true face that final day and he’s glad. He’s glad that ugliness was Lilith’s alone.

Finally, finally Ruby reaches him and his chest makes a disgusting squelching sound when she heaves him off the hooks. Dean doesn’t really know what to do, but she holds him there with strength she shouldn’t have, until Dean gets a clue and wraps his hands in the chains. She heads back in the direction she came from, but still Dean doesn’t move.

“Come on,” Ruby says over her shoulder. “What are you waiting for? Sam’s holding the back door open just for you, asshole.”

And for the first time since he died, Dean can clearly remember his brother—Sam’s stupid hair, his silly grin, his eyes wet with tears. 

Dean puts one hand in front of the other.


End file.
